Since several weeks Logan announced this Linux meetup about Open Protocols & Standards. He got inspired after attending the IETF 93 meeting that happened in Prague this year. Upon coming back to Mauritius, he thought it’d would be cool to share the experience with other like-minded folks..

Thanks to Ashmita & Nirvan, he happened to get a room for the meetup at the University of Mauritius. Thus everything was finalized for Saturday 29 August 2015, that is today. It’s been a long time since we had a Linux meetup; I could list a series of reasons but they would all be unjustified :-/ Never mind, this one was happening, I could not have missed it.

I reached the University of Mauritius at 12h30, found a parking lot, picked up my bag and went in search for room 2.12 which should be in Phase II (the building how it’s called at the university).

Logan was right outside the room talking to three girls. I just greeted him without interrupting his business. We were around 8 attendees while some were on the way. Logan started his prez at 12h45. He states there is a “problem” that dates back 20 years but very few people have considered it. He then started talking about a slow Internet situation. He explains about Bufferbloat (lag) under a network load.

Logan mentioned that when the bandwidth crosses the bar of 5Mbit/s it becomes insignificant. The real sluggishness of the internet is then due to high latency. He cited scenarios where several users in a household would suffer if they use Skype, upload documents and watch YouTube simultaneously.

Logan told us about his experiment on a TP-Link router while replacing the latter’s firmware by OpenWRT. He was able to apply tweaks that would remedy his latency issues when several users on his home network would use the internet. The discussion continued on the TCP/IP standard and Logan shared some knowledge he acquired during the IETF 93 meeting.

Around 14h30 we had a break and we went to the university cafeteria.

After the break, the discussion went more technical and Logan explained about the fq_codel implementation in OpenWRT. CoDel aims to defeat bufferbloat, which refers to an excessive buffering of packets. The latter leads to high latency and finally we see the sluggishness in network-related applications as mentioned in the beginning.

Logan has shared his presentation slides for those who’d like to have a look.

That was a cool meetup after a long time :)